1. Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his VP. Ezra Klein breaks down that choice. I have about 20 other good links on this that I’ll write into a separate round-up that the non-wonks in my readership can just skip.

+ From the people who were trying to give him free tickets to the Calgary Stampede. As a friend said on Twitter…if he had had his hand-guns, would this be a story of a senseless murder of two young men instead? Isn’t this a picture-perfect argument for why we don’t give guns to everyone, so that paranoid trigger-happy entitled pricks like this don’t get to shoot up everyone they don’t like?

5. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that patients who were diagnosed as “mentally retarded” could not be subjected to the death penalty, under the 8th Amendment. In 2012, Texas said “fuck it”, and decided to execute a man with an IQ of 61 who has trouble dressing himself. Their criteria? Of Mice and Men. “Anyone less impaired than Steinbeck’s fictional migrant ranch worker should have no constitutional protection.”

+ Two of the unexpected darlings of the Mars landing were two engineers whose hairstyle and rock-and-roll looks have won them the hearts of geeks around the world. What’s the best way to reward them? Competing on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, of course.